Last week my partner and I went to Disneyland Paris for a few days! Neither of us had been since we were kids, and given the stressful, wobbly few weeks we’d both had, we really wanted a fun, silly holiday doing something totally self-indulgent and un-adult. Disneyland was all of those things 🙂

Because we went off-peak, a handful of rides were closed for renovation (including 2 of my previous favourites, Space Mountain and Phantom Manor, boo!), but on the flipside, it was very quiet. The longest queue took 30 minutes, whereas I remember previous Disneyland holidays queuing for over an hour for every single ride.

We made a Lego Cath and Daf at the Disney Lego store! I believe I’m sporting the Ariel hairdo here 🙂

5 less lovely things about Disneyland Paris:

Screaming crying kids almost everywhere (though that comes with the territory)

Occasional rude staff – many of them were lovely, but some were quite snippy and abrupt.

Overpriced food.

Public smoking – many times we had puffs of cigarette smoke blown in our faces from passing tourists, and it was gross.

Lack of respect for traffic flow/queues/waiting one’s turn – everything was chaos! I had memorised “la file, s’il vous plait!” (“the queue please!”) for queue-jumpers but thankfully nothing escalated to the point where I needed to say it.

Alice’s curious labyrinth is a good metaphor for the French queuing system.

SO MANY PRAMS.

Another weird thing about Disneyland Paris (but not particularly unpleasant) is how dated most of the park is. Many attractions and fixtures have been there since the 80s, and stick out as being particularly old hat, even for my generation, e.g. Captain EO.

This is only the 2nd Disneyland I’ve been to, and I’d say that it doesn’t quite measure up to Tokyo DisneySea – DisneySea was much cleaner, more colourful, more friendly, and more accomodating. That said, I still had an amazing time. If I ever come to Disneyland Paris again, it’d probably only be for 1 day.